Music HERstory: Violet Archer (1913 - 2000)

Violet Archer (1913 - 2000)

Biography

Violet Louise Archer (born Violetta Teresa Balestreri) was a Canadian composer, teacher, pianist, organist and percussionist. Born in Montreal, Quebec, on April 24th 1913, Violet was the third of four children. Her parents Beatrice and Cesare Balestreri were recent immigrants to Canada, having arrived only the previous year. They came to Canada to start a new life and left their two young sons behind in Italy, planning to return for them once they were established in Montreal. Beatrice planned to return to Italy in 1913, but her pregnancy and the birth of Violet delayed her. She returned to Italy to fetch her sons with the infant Violet only in July of 1914, unaware of the political unrest in Europe. The outbreak of First World War in August of 1914 kept Beatrice and her three children in Italy until July 1919. For this reason Violet spent her earliest years in Italy and learned the Italian language before learning English or French, the Canadian official languages.

While in Italy Violet received her first musical impressions, which were strengthened back in Canada by her opera-loving parents and by the Presbyterian Church services that she attended. Her musical training began before she was ten years old with piano lessons. She began to compose at the age of 16. In 1930 Violet graduated from the Montréal High School for Girls and immediately enrolled at McGill University in Music.

Those were the times of the Great Depression and Violet’s family could offer no financial support to her studies. In order to help paying her tuition she began working as a piano accompanist for the studio of a voice teacher while attending the McGill Conservatory. At the University she studied piano with Dorothy Shearwood-Stubington and organ with J.J. Weatherseed. She also studied composition with Claude Champagne and Douglas Clarke. She earned a Licentiate in Pianoforte at McGill University in 1934, a Bachelor of Music degree there in 1936 and the Associate Diploma of the Royal Canadian College of Organists in 1938. During those years, she was active as a professional accompanist for singers and as a piano teacher, as well as deputy organist in many Montreal churches.

During those years Violet continued to compose and made her formal debut as an orchestral composer with her composition Scherzo Sinfonico, performed by the Montreal Orchestra under Douglas Clarke in 1940. That year, she and her family legally adopted the surname Archer, which is an English translation of “Balestreri”. The following year Sir Adrian Boult selected her work Britannia - A Joyful Overture for a BBC broadcast on 19 March 1942. The piece was later recorded and broadcasted by the BBC to the armed forces in Europe.

In the summer of 1942 Violet commuted to New York for private studies with the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. He introduced Violet to Hungarian folk tunes, to variation technique and instilled in her an abiding interest in folk music. He also inspired her to explore different types of modes and rhythms. She taught at the McGill Conservatory from 1944 to 1947. In 1947 she started to study composition at Yale University, under the scholarships support of the Bradley-Keeler Memorial, the Québec government and the Charles Ditson Fellowship. There she studied for two years with composer Paul Hindemith, considered one of the great musical minds of the 20th century. Violet earned her Bachelor of Music degree at Yale in 1948 and a Master of Music degree the following year. She won Yale’s Woods Chandler Memorial Prize in 1949 for her large choral-orchestral work, The Bell, which was premiered in 1953 by the Montreal Bach Choir. Her Fanfare and Passacaglia was premiered at the 1949 International Student Symposium of Music in Boston. Violet would later receive a citation for distinguished service in music from the Yale School of Music Alumni Association in 1968.

She also was a percussionist with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra from 1947 to 1949, and taught at the University of Alberta summer school in 1948 and 1949. An award in 1949 from the Ladies' Morning Musical Club of Montréal enabled her to spend some time in England in 1950. She performed her piano works there, as well as in France, Switzerland and Italy.

From 1950 to 1953, Violet served as the composer-in-residence at North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas), where she also studied musicology with Otto Kinkeldey. She taught at Cornell University in 1952 and was a professor of composition at the University of Oklahoma from 1953 to 1961; while there, she hosted radio and television programs devoted to 20th century music, and acted as a state judge (1953–61) and national judge (1959–61) for various young composer competitions. She received a grant to compose at the MacDowell Colony (the oldest artists’ retreat in the US) in the summer of 1956, and a Canada Council senior fellowship allowed her to take a year's leave (1958–59) from the University of Oklahoma to complete four works, including Apocalypse and the Violin Concerto.

Following her return to Canada, she took up doctoral studies at the University of Toronto in 1961, but was forced to put this aside to nurse her ailing mother. In 1962, she joined the music faculty at the University of Alberta, where she was appointed chair of the music theory and composition department. She remained at the University of Alberta until her retirement in 1978, when she was named professor emeritus and continued to lecture part-time.

Violet was awarded the honorary Doctor of Music Degree by McGill University in 1971 and by the University of Windsor in 1986, and Legum Doctor (Doctor of Laws) by the University of Calgary in 1989. Her many distinctions include the Creative and Perfomance Award of Edmonton in 1972, induction into Edmonton’s Cultural Hall of Fame in 1983, membership of the Order of Canada in 1983 and the Canadian Music Council’s Composer of the Year award in 1984.

Violet Archer, a seminal figure in Canadian composition, passed away on February 21, 2000 in Ottawa, Canada. She created a distinguished body of work during a career that spanned over six decades. With a life-long commitment to music that left no room for marriage, her music was heralded and performed around the world, and earned honors and awards for her both in Canada and abroad.

Compositions

Violet Archer wrote more than 280 compositions. Her wide and extensive repertoire ranges from music for solo flute to electronic music, with an emphasis on chamber music, choral music and songs for solo voice and piano.

A methodical composer, she worked efficiently and comfortably in the Western classical music tradition but also incorporated more modernist serial procedures, parallelism and folk influences into her music. Her early works reflect the influence of modality from such influences as Douglas Clarke and Vaughan Williams. An emerging tendency toward chromaticism can be heard in her work, in addition to her acceptance of the Gebrauchsmusik ethic (music written for a specific purpose). She taught her students 12-tone technique (dodecaphony), but never applied it to her own work, nor did she use aleatoric procedures (composing by chance).

Violet produced a large body of music embracing most of the vocal and instrumental performance media, including the comic opera Sganarelle (1973) and a film score for the documentary Someone Cares (1976). The major influence of Hindemith is reflected in the majority of her works after 1950, a significant number of which consisted of educational or pedagogical works. Recognizing the importance of creating both musicians and audiences that understand and appreciate 20th century harmony, melody and rhythm, she wrote many pieces for elementary and intermediate performers, and encouraged other composers to write for children.

During her teaching years in the US, the influence of Arnold Schoenberg, the creator of 12-tone technique, asserted itself in her variation techniques. Her composition Cantata Sacra (1966) displayed a strong expressionistic element. Her growing interest in dramatic and evocative sonorities led to the expressionism of the Prelude-Incantation (1964). Violet was not afraid of new innovations, and in the 1970s her Haiku and Episodes used electronic sounds.

Among her early works, those for piano were the most skillful, but she soon made effective use of the orchestra, particularly after studying clarinet, percussion, strings and brass, and after becoming Hindemith’s student. Her augmented skills are on full display in her Piano Concerto (1956), with its brilliant solo part and transparent orchestral writing in which the winds have solos in a spare texture — a typical Violet feature. This concerto demands great virtuosity from soloist and orchestra alike.

Adroit counterpoint and strong formal organization are hallmarks of Violet Archer’s compositions. Her interest in the rhythmic freedom of folk music became highly developed and abstracted in her sonatas and her String Trio No. 2 (1961). Violet described her music as containing Canadian landscape influences; Canadian folk influences can also be found in her Evocations (1987), which incorporates Inuit and West Coast Aboriginal themes. She often turned to Canadian folk music for melodic and rhythmic ideas in her works for children and music students, as well as for concert pieces, such as the piano trio Ikpakhuaq. Often inspired by poetry, she wrote several song cycles and individual songs using poems as varied as those by Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and Dorothy Livesay.

Several of Violet's compositions have been recorded by artists such as Christina Petrowska Quilico and the CBC Vancouver Orchestra (the Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra), and by pianist Elaine Keillor and clarinetist James Campbell.

In her final decade, Violet continued composing, teaching and traveling to premieres of her music. In 1993, at the age of 80, she was composer-in-residence at the Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound, Ontario. She moved from Edmonton to Ottawa in 1998 to be closer to her family and completed her final commissioned composition, Concerto for Accordion and Orchestra, the year before her death.

For more information:

1. "The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers”, book by Sadie, Julie Anne, Ph. D. (Editor), Samuel, Rhian, Ph.D. (Editor) - Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 17, 1995) - ISBN-10: 0393034879

2. Violet Archer: A Canadian woman in composition”, book by Banfield, Emma, D.M., Northwestern University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2010. 3411441.

3. "Violet Archer: Biography”, Canadian Music Center web portal, Composer Showcase: https://www.musiccentre.ca/node/37184/biography

4. "Divertimento for Piano & Strings" by Violet Archer”, performed by Christina Petrowska Quilico, piano, The Koffler Chamber Orchestra (conducted by Jacques Israelievitch). video by Mrs Christina Petrowska Quilico: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz4wLLc56cU&list=PL-yK083YmtjpBNuvEoXQJ73-PP7ryAYLB&index=2

5. "New Historical Anthology of Music by Women”, book by Briscoe, James R. (Editor), foreword by McClary, Susan - Publisher: Indiana University Press (August 11, 2004), ISBN: 978-0-253-21683-